Monocool Blog

What was meant to be a quick game to design and develop, somehow turned into over a year, but we have finally reached the finish line and Mirrors is now live on Steam! Mirrors will be available for purchase as of 11th October 2017 from its Store Page located here.

Help Us

Although you can’t buy it right now, you can help us by following and adding Mirrors to your Steam wishlist anytime between now and it’s release. By following and wishlisting Mirrors, it will help get Mirrors into a better place for displaying it in the ‘new games’ category (among other benefits) which in turn will help us get more sales of Mirrors. So be awesome and go and follow / wishlist it here.

Hurdles in Development

There are a load of reasons why development time jumped from a few weeks to a few months to over a year.

Steam Greenlight

Depending on how you look at it we had a failed or successful Steam Greenlight campaign just before Steam Greenlight was stopped. It was a success purely because we got almost 50% more Yes votes than No votes, which is also a good thing. Sadly it was a failure because even with the difference in Yes votes to No votes, we still didn’t make it into the top 10% to actually get Greenlit. The only reason I can think of this is purely because, although Mirrors is a cool little game, I know it’s not going to be for everyone. Mirrors isn’t the first game that has a select audience and it definitely won’t be the last. Regardless of how good or bad Steam Greenlight went, Mirrors is on Steam now and that is the most important thing.

Additional / Contract Work

On top of Mirrors and some of the other games we’re working on, we also took on a fair bit of contract work including Soju Party and Storyboard, not to mention working on Deal Director and some of our other projects. Obviously when we were working on all of these other projects Mirrors unfortunately had to take a place at the back of the queue.

Reflections

The way in which the reflections work within Mirrors turned out to be far from simple and required a lot of tinkering to get it perfect. Before using our current setup we tried a variety of options but none seemed to work. Now after one of our programmers has spent a load of time perfecting the reflections code, it’s pretty much amazing though we know of one or two areas we would like to improve on.

Development and Redevelopment of the Level System

The level system within Mirrors has been developed about 4-5 times. The first few versions were OK but they were pretty basic and restricting, they almost made no sense in regards to the progression of the game. From there we moved into the adventure mode where you have multiple fictional locations within a dessert. Each location holds a number of levels and completing each location allows access to the next area. We also have an area for players to access custom made levels. It’s straight forward of course, but its simplicity is far better than the complex and not so useful versions we used originally.

The Future of Mirrors

Over the next few weeks and months, regardless of how well or popular Mirrors is or becomes, there are a few things we would like to add and iron out.

Fixing Bugs and Responding to Feedback

Based on feedback, we will be focusing on fixing bugs as they are found. We are confident that Mirrors is mostly bug free, but we’re not infallible and bugs can appear from nowhere. In addition to this we will be taking on board the opinions of the players and any issues that seem to be game breaking. Improving Mirrors benefits everyone. For this reason we look forward to getting as much feedback as possible as well as hearing your ideas.

Steam Achievements and Trading Cards

We will also be adding a range of Steam Achievements to Mirrors. We’ve done a lot of research and Steam Achievements seem to be a big selling point for games. Some of the achievements we have planned will be self explanatory but others will take time to execute such as hitting a mummy with an ice trap.

Adding Shadows

We are in the process of adding a really cool shadow system which will see the lighting from the previous tombs lighting up the current tomb. It’s really great as it casts a silhouette of the current assets around the tomb and makes our high quality graphics that much more impressive. This shouldn’t take too long to implement and we look forward to sharing it with you.

Adding additional Game Mode(s)

We have a lot of intentions to add a variety of extra modes and game play to Mirrors but these things will take time. We have the idea for implementing an Arcade Mode which will see you clearing as many tombs as possible within a set time limit. There is also the plans to implement a multiplayer mode where you can compete against other players to see who can clear tombs the quickest.